And Our Hats Are Off To You

Wottle's success on the track bespeaks no wider impulse to be different. "People around here have an idea of the all-American image—apple pie, clean, obedient, doesn't run around—and I guess I'm trying to fit into that. People will accept me better if I do, and at this stage of my life acceptance is important. Like the other day at the cashier's window when my room and board check wasn't ready. Last year I would have let the office know I was upset. This year, because of all the attention I've had, I didn't want to make a scene. I mean I wanted to, but I didn't. I don't think that's hypocritical because it's just little things. It's just showing some consideration for what people want to believe. Sure, I wish I weren't the means by which a lot of people satisfy their own needs, but it's not a big thing. I haven't restructured much."

Wottle grew up in Canton, Ohio, where his father is an inspector in a Ford forging plant. "He just inspects, looks for cracks, whatever they do. My mother is a housewife. They're somewhere between middle middle class and upper middle class—very conservative. My mom was the more athletic of the two, but I think my dad was my most loyal fan. After my first race ever, as a freshman in high school, he cut the article out of the paper and brought it to me. I'd been third. I wasn't mentioned. He told me to make a note of my time and place in the margin and start a scrapbook. Every week he'd cut another article. 'You never know,' he said. 'You might be good some day, and then you'd want these.' "

After dinner, when talk inevitably returns to the Olympic experience, Wottle brings out his scrapbooks and training journals. He will not, however, open his official Olympic book, a creation of the United States Olympic Committee. "A lot of guys who were on the team told me when they opened theirs all the pages fell out. I don't want all my pages to fall out." The scrapbooks are labeled 1972 Season, Olympic Trials and Olympics. The frontispiece of the last is a drawing of weeping faces under the legend, "Is There Any Hope?" Leafing through it, one is bewildered to find that a man who so closely identifies with his society's expectations should have unwittingly touched off a summer-long pageant of controversies.

First there was the issue of Jan. Says Wottle, "I tell people that I was mentally tired after the Trials [where he equaled the 800-meter world record of 1:44.3 that was broken last week by Marcello Fiasconaro of Italy with a 1:43.7], so I came home and got married. They usually laugh." Head U.S. Track Coach Bill Bowerman was not amused. The energy drain of a honeymoon, Bowerman said, is so great Wottle wouldn't get past the Olympic quarterfinals. The Wottles' sex life at Munich (which consisted mainly of abstinence) was promptly spread across the pages of the indignant Canton Repository.

" Bowerman and I get along fine," says Wottle. "It was the dumb newspapers that kept it going." There was also the issue of Wottle's own flimsiness. "We had a week in Maine near the end of July. I was stupid and tried to jump right in where I was before I eased off following the Trials. I did four hard quarters, and warming down my left knee started to hurt." It was the first sign of tendinitis. He refers to his diary. "Here it is," he says. "August 4, 1972. We were in Oslo and I was really stiff. A doctor on the USOC medical staff said he would fix me up. He gave me a shot right in the knee joint, said wait an hour, then run."

"What was the shot?"

"Novocain."

"Novocain!"

"Yep. At the end of the hour I couldn't bend my leg. This is what I wrote: I question whether the doctor knows exactly what he's doing.' Eventually I got better through rest and keeping my distance from all needles." He gazes at his journal. "I think that's cool. To have a record of it all. You never remember the pain. In these other files I have every clipping people have sent about the Olympics. When I'm older I'm going to enjoy looking back at these."

Jan wrinkles her nose. "I didn't read most of those articles. It was just the same thing over and over, the hat and how it didn't come off during the anthem."